Justina Blakeney

So, yeah, I grew up in a very multicultural, very big, boisterous, loud, raucous family.

And we grew up in Berkeley.

So there was this spirit of kind of individualism in the sense that, you know, everyone was sort of allowed to be themselves more in Berkeley, I think, than in a lot of places in the world where it's sort of celebrated.

But I think growing up multiracial and I'm Jewish and I was raised Jewish, I always felt a little bit, a little bit like an outsider in different places.

And we traveled a lot.

And what I noticed when we started traveling was that my sister and brother and I, we could go places and so many different places in the world, people thought that we were from there because they just didn't know.

Yeah.

They couldn't tell and were sort of ambiguous in that way.

And I think that's one of the reasons why I have a good ear for languages.

I sort of started picking up different languages and really being able to kind of just figure out how to blend in into different places so that I could feel like I belonged.

And that was almost like a hack for me to sort of feel a belonging in different circles.

And I think that what that

orientation did for me as I was growing up was it started to make me feel comfortable not fitting in.

and being okay with standing out more and having just a general sort of comfort with people staring at me or feeling like I didn't totally know what was going on or didn't belong in that way.

And so, yeah, I think there's always the balance of the ricochet between, oh, I feel like I fit in here and I feel like I belong.

And oh my gosh, I feel like a total outsider.

And I feel like there was a lot of ping-ponging between feeling

both of those things, but I feel like my parents made a pretty concerted effort not to put any kind of identity onto us as we were growing up.

And so in part that hindered some of my feelings of belonging in the sense that, you know, I didn't necessarily grow up feeling like, oh, this is what I am.

But on the other side of it, it allowed me the freedom to be on a journey to figure out what that meant for myself.